mondaymusings

Targeted subsidies entail explicit extra administrative costs and implicit costs (or benefit omissions) when some eligibles do not receive the subsidy due to e.g. paperwork friction. The alternative is universal benefits + taxes. See https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/2022/11/11/universal-be...

> See how a train being fast was bundled into the question.

Fast doesn't entail faster than a plane.

> the train would need to be more expensive

In my experience international train travel in Europe is always more expensive, sometimes 3-4 times more expensive, than airtravel. Due to subsidies and externalities. https://stay-grounded.org/privileged-position-revealing-the-...

Against your "almost nobody thinks like that" I and others described that we do think like that and personally know others who do too. I also posted two links that has some more general evidence against your claim. Your reply has some reason to lessen the weight given to that evidence, but not enough to cancel it. I rest my case until you present empirical counterevidence.

Your speculations/prejudice about motivations of others is not evidence and such stories can be made up in almost any direction e.g. maybe you delude yourself into thinking no one takes trains for environmental reasons because it makes you feel good and superior in thinking you know their motivations better than they do.

I have avoided flying and instead used trains for the last 10 years due to climate concerns. I know plenty of people who have made the same change in behaviour and my experience from the public debate in the nordic countries is that such a behaviour shift has grown more common among consumers in general. I found no study on consumer preferences on this topic that covers all of Europe but to get started here are two reports on single country surveys, in Portugal and Germany. https://www.eib.org/en/press/all/2021-389-91-of-portuguese-p... https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200128-why-germans-ar... Do you know of some survey evidence that points in the other direction?

1. The PDF format is wildly overcapable compared to the majority of actual use (view text, tables and images).

2. The number of user devices with unpatched PDF readers is likely large.

3. The system of paywalled scientific knowledge drives millions of students and researchers to get their science PDFs from scihub and libgen pirate sites hosted in former Soviet countries, sometimes over http (not https).

These three facts combine to a huge vulnerabilty space.

On the flipside a sane and open PDF replacement format that also offered reduced file size could gain many users quickly by convincing scihub and libgen to convert and offer their files in the new format to cut costs and shorten download time, with reduced vuln as a positive externality.